How Barack Obama Won Facebook

How did Barack Obama come to dominate Facebook? One move that helped: Hiring Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in early 2007.

Hughes, 24, was Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate. Now he runs Obama's own social network, My.BarackObama.com, which has 900k members (up from 850,000 a week ago, apparently, when BusinessWeek paid homage to Obama's Web strategy.)

The Obama camp credits its own Internet operation with turning out enough volunteers to take the Texas caucus despite losing the popular vote in the state to Hillary Clinton. Then again, Howard Dean had a revolutionary Web strategy in 2004, and so did John McCain ... in 2000.